A BLAST FROM THE PAST - To find out whether human activities are changing the atmosphere, scientists
took ice cores from ancient glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. Bubbles of air trapped in the ice provided a pristine sampling
of the atmosphere going back 650,000 years. The study, published last month in the journal Science, found that the level of
carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases that can warm the planet, is now 27 percent higher than at any previous time in
that period. Climatologists said the ice cores left no doubt that the burning of fossil fuels is altering the atmosphere in
a substantial and unprecedented way.

THE DAY AFTER TODAY - One of the more alarming possible consequences of
global warming appears to be already under way. The rapid melting of the Arctic and Greenland ice caps, a new study finds,
is causing freshwater to flood into the North Atlantic, deflecting the northward flow of the warming Gulf Stream, which moderates
winter temperatures for Europe and the northeastern United States.

The flow of the Gulf Stream has been reduced by
30 percent since 1957, the National Oceanography Center in Britain found. In the film "The Day After Tomorrow," the collapse
of the Gulf Stream produces a violent climate shift and a new ice age for much of the Northern Hemisphere. Climatologists
don't foresee a future quite that catastrophic, but something worrisome, they say, is afoot.

And he notes that scientists
have pieced together, from fragments found in tissue samples, the Spanish flu virus that killed twenty-five million people
in 1918 - it produces 39,000 times more copies of itself than regular flu and, in an experiment, killed all the mice being
tested in six days. Then they published the flu's genetic blueprint. So who has a home chemistry kit?

He also mentions
that, in 2005, scientists developed a vaccine against human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease that is the primary
cause of cervical cancer. The vaccine produced total immunity in the 6,000 women who received it as part of a multinational
trial. The Family Research Council and other social conservative groups in America vowed to ban it, even though it could virtually
eliminate cervical cancer. Vaccinating girls against a sexually transmitted disease, they say, would reduce their incentive
to abstain from premarital sex. Oh well.

The top national stories - from The Oregonianhere and from The Clarion-Ledger (Mississippi) here

From the mainstream, CNN's "Year in Review" is here and the amazing, in-depth "The Year in Ideas" from the New York Times is here. National Public Radio's top stories, with podcast, are here.

For the Brits, from BBC, most popular stories, among BBC readers - Stories That Mattered to You - in February, Prince Charles to Marry Camilla was the biggest story.

Obituaries of prominent and influential people
who died in 2005 from the Associated Press here, from the New York Timeshere, and from BBC here. Time Magazine's "Persons of the Year" item is here (Bill and Melinda Gates, and Bono) - and Barbara Walter's "Most Fascinating People of 2005" is here (Tom Cruise at the top).

General reviews - highlights of key events of 2005 by month from Infopleasehere, and the online cooperative encyclopedia Wikipedia covers most everything from the year here.

Hooray for Hollywood? From the Internet Movie Database a complete index of all 17,337 movies released in 2005 here. Whatever.

For the politically minded, see Eleanor Clift's Biggest Political Lies of 2005 - "Who told the worst political untruth of 2005? It's a shame the list of contenders is so long." And Newsweek offers
the twenty-four political cartoons of the year here, and the best quotes of the year here. In that last item you'll find former First Lady Barbara Bush, on hurricane refugees in the Houston Astrodome - "What I'm
hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so
many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." The White
House qualified that remark as a "personal observation."